Since zehN, HS and innocent came into the team, you officially became an international roster instead of a German one. We know that last year, PENTA said they wanted to keep a majority of German players to keep doing national tournaments. Can you explain why they changed their minds and why they chose to take international players?

We tried everything that we could to keep the German core with stfN. In the end it just didn’t work out, also because for example stfN couldn’t go full-time, and when sunNy agreed to keep playing with us, he and me, we wanted to go full-time 100%. We had to look for players who had the same goal. Even before sunNy joined, I tried a lot of different German lineups, all of them had one or two players from Europe but the German core was still there. But in the end it just always didn’t work so we decided to give it a try with an international lineup.

Don’t you have any communication problems because of all the languages? For example, do sunNy and zehN sometimes speak Finnish during key moments?

I think there are always some moments were the communication could be better because we are all from different countries. zehN and sunNy actually never speak Finnish when they are alive because we made it a rule that it’s confusing for others. We just keep it always in English. Most of the time the communication is good but of course there are moments when there has to be fast decisions, or where we’re one or two seconds behind because normally we would have spoken in our native language, but I think it’s the only problem that comes from that so that’s ok.

Last May, naSu became your coach. Can you tell us a bit what has changed since he came,  what did he bring to your play?

naSu in general is an experienced player, he played on a top level back in 1.6, so we kinda knew what we had with him. After he joined the team, he was helping me a lot creating game plans or analyzing enemies so that I don’t have to do it myself and can focus on other things. And he just tries to put work away from me or from sunNy for example, because I’m doing this stuff mostly with sunNy. Like I do the stuff, I show him and we discuss if it’s good or not, then we show the team. That’s where naSu helps us with his analysis so we don’t have to do that as well. And if he sees something for example when we prac, of course he tries to help us and fix mistakes or something. So basically, he tries to take the work away from us so we can be more focused.

So now a few questions about what happened recently during the qualifications. Actually, you are the first team to ever get into the Major while starting from the bottom. First you won the open qualifier, then won 3-0 during the Minor, then 3-1 during the Major’s qualifier. So can you tell us how you trained to get to this point, and what were your goals at the beginning? Were you hoping for such a result? 

I think everyone’s goal was to get into the Major, it’s been mine since two years ago obviously. And with the new team we just started, for example innocent also always said “I would have never believed that we’d be where we are now”, and it’s just a great feeling. But, yeah, we worked really hard, we discussed a lot on the server when we made mistakes. I’m not the kind of IGL, for example that flames his team like “You fuckep up” or something, but it’s more like sunNy is my counterpart to that, if he sees some mistakes which are individual based, he’ll say “you shouldn’t have done that” and then give the solution. He is always the guy who tries to fix those mistakes, and I think that’s one of the reasons why we went so good so fast, because we were discussing everything that went wrong, but which we basically have to have, or which we need to fix so we can win.

Also we tried to focus more on ourselves, because obviously we’re not that experienced. We don’t have many experienced players, since only me and innocent played at a Major before. So how to fix that lack of experience? We thought that we should just focus on ourselves at the beginning, and then after we played a long time together, we could start expanding our style, trying to anti-strat the enemies and so on. But until the Major, we barely looked at what the enemies are doing, only naSu, as I said before, did a little bit. But we tried to focus more on ourselves, so that we’re confident in what we do, so we know exactly what will happen if we do this or that, and so on. So that’s how we approached our team.

To talk a bit more about the qualification system, you managed to qualify in the most competitive region of the world, because in Europe, the sub-top level is pretty homogeneous. It makes it hard to get a spot for the Major. So when you managed to get this spot, did you feel that maybe Valve should reconsider the Minor/Major system to give more chances to European teams?

Like you said, I think the European region is where the strongest teams are. If you look on paper who can be on the next Minor qualifier from Europe, it’s like all the teams are really good or were in a Major before, like NIP, EnVyUs, Heroic, and they don’t really compare to the CIS region for example. Not saying that they’re bad, but obviously the competition on the European scene is much higher. So I think that there should be some change, but I’m not sure what exactly.

Maybe they should make one huge Minor qualifier with everyone, or maybe they should increase the number of teams that go to the Major, since like I said for example, NIP and EnVyUs are really good teams, but they’re not at the Major. So maybe add 6 more teams, or instead of 16 make it 32, I don’t know. But I think there has to be change because it’s not fair, and like you said it’s really hard. I don’t want to denigrate any other region, but what we achieved is really rare and it’s probably not gonna happen anytime soon again. And that’s just because of the system, not because the teams are bad. You play so many BO1 and so... you saw that NIP lost the qualifier because they had to play again in a BO1, so if other teams went through that in Europe, maybe at some point they would have lost that match, that’s why I think it’s not fair. 

Then about what happened during the Major. You knew you would be fighting against really strong opponents. You played against SK, North, F3, and also won against Vega Squadron. Do you think all this was a logical result, are you satisfied with what you’ve accomplished? Is it already enough for you, or did you think you could get even further in the tournament?

I think everyone’s not that happy, because we knew that we basically lost the games because of our fault, and not because the enemies were playing really good. We knew for example against SK that they’re the best team in the world. We started pretty poorly with 0-10, and then came back 16-13, we lost really close. But then against Flipside for example, we had a huge lead, but we just gave up a lot of rounds and I also blame myself a lot for that because I just called really bad in this match.

Of course it’s a team game, but that’s just how I feel. And I think that if we’d played the same way and with the same confidence as in the Major qualifier, we probably would have won at least against Flipside and maybe we would have beaten Immortals. So I think the 2-2 was certainly deserved for us, but with the way we played we just didn’t make it and maybe we didn’t deserve it. That’s why we’re actually a bit sad about that, I’m also frustrated at myself.

Last question. Now that you’ve managed to get this far, what’s next for you? What’s the next tournament you’re going to prepare for? 

Our goal of course is to get more consistent in our play in general, because we know we can compete against those teams, on a Minor or Major qualifier, and even in a Major we can compete but we just need to find some sort of consistency and maybe confidence, I don’t know what it is exactly. But we will now have a little break, I don’t know how long, maybe a week or something. Because we were all over the world for the last four months, Minor, qualifier and Major, and also some other events, so the break is gonna be really good. After that we’re just gonna start again, and try to see what we can do.